Customer
Case
By Paul
Huijnen, Business Group Information Manager at Trouw Nutrition International
Autumn 2008
Ometa’s Integrator and Microsoft SharePoint
Workflow enable Trouw Nutrition International to insert and update business
data in Movex via a SharePoint Portal.
Trouw Nutrition International (TNI) is a division of
Nutreco, an international animal nutrition and fish feed company. It has a workforce of 9,090 employees, located
in approximately 100 production plants in 24 countries.
As globalisation requires common processes, all
business units of TNI use a common Movex ERP system (on an AS400 platform) with
common customer tables, product tables etc.
As the number of Movex users increased, data
management and data quality became an issue. Manual procedures (via e-mail/fax/
phone) were put in place to ensure users did not modify data (e.g. customer
credit limits) in the ERP system without authorised approval and communication
to other groups.
There was an opportunity to optimize this
process as it was very time consuming and open for mistakes.
New requirements related to segregation of duties
(SOD) and audit trail resulted in a request to automate the process. TNI
decided to build a data-management portal in order to maintain all common ERP
data worldwide.
We had the following requirements: ·
It
must be a generic platform
·
It
must support SOD
·
It
must have an audit trail of the changes to the data
·
It
must support communication and approval with regard to creating, changing and
deleting ERP data
· It
must be possible to report on bottlenecks
· At
field level it must be possible to define the authorized users for editing
· At
field level it must be possible to define the approvers
·
When
multiple fields are changed on an existing record, it must result in parallel
workflows
·
Inserts/updates
can only be sent to Movex when all approvers accept the changed data.
We already used Microsoft SharePoint as our collaboration
platform. Now we also wanted to use this generic platform for the data
management portal. A seamless integration between Movex and MS SharePoint was
required. We turned to Ometa for help.
Ometa implemented their MOVEX
integration solution to disclose the ERP data within SharePoint. In the first
phase it was possible to create new customer files or to update existing
customer data from a SharePoint data management portal. Similar concepts are
now implemented for product info, warehouse data etc.
Ometa also designed a new Workflow
template with field based approvals, instead of the standard record based
approval.
Examples:
·
Changing customer data will only result in approval
notifications to the finance department when finance related fields of the
customer, e.g. credit limits, are changed.
·
Parallel flows will start when multiple fields, that require different approval groups, are
changed
·
In case the person that updated the field/record and
the approver are one and the same, a message is sent to the data manager to
inform him on the violation of the Segregation of Duty. The data manager can
start an audit based on this alert.
After receiving all approvals, the
update/creation is done automatically in Movex. All requirements listed above
were met.
The new workflow template built by
Ometa is generic. It can be reused for any type of approval item (customer,
article, warehouse information) when several groups work on the same data set
but have different authorisation and approval rights.
Company Profile Snapshot
(Source: Wright Investors' Service)
Nutreco Holding
NV(NUTRECO). The Group's principal activities are producing food for farm
animals such as poultry, pigs and ruminants, salmon and sea trout and
production of broiler chickens. The Group operates in three segments: Animal
Nutrition, Fish Feed, and Meat and Other Activities. On 31 December 2007, the
Group had a workforce of 9,090 employees mainly located in approximately 100
production plants in 24 countries.